One learns to love what one is taught
by Kaiyo No Hime
Summary: Through darkness he falls, and in fire he lands. Post Thor, pre Avengers.


One learns to love what one is taught

by Kaiyo no Hime

* * *

Falling and falling and falling. It consumed his mind, wrapping and twisting the surrounding darkness; knitting it through his body and his soul. All he could be sure of was falling. Everything else was a nightmarish dream, it could only be a dream.

There was no light in the darkness, no sweet mother, no stern father, no caring brother. Just cold eternal. No life. No death. No hope. Nothing but him and the lack of anything else.

He had laughed about it once, when the dreams were still fresh in his mind and he had been fooled into believing they were real. Laughed because he had wanted to be here. Because the shattered, beautiful light that had surrounded him had be so painful, too painful to bear. But now, as that all dimmed at became nothing but a pointless though, he wondered what could ever even be beyond the darkness. His voice was lost into the nothingness, his sight just a figment with nothing to see.

And then the darkness ended, and there had been _pain_.

Oh how he had longed for the pure nothingness he had fallen through in his escape then. The pain was all consuming, all surrounding. Where once there was nothing now there was fire and ice and blood and screaming. It was futile to try to stop screaming, it seemed to cause the twisted demons to press steel even farther into his flesh, twisting and shredding and re knitting the wounds. There would be no death in this realm of eternal pain anymore than there had been in the sweet darkness.

"What is your name," a faceless minion demanded, gently cutting ribbons from his left arm.

"Loki," he rasped, denying nothing, "Loki. Loki. Loki."

"Why are you here," the creature demanded again, the blade twisting.

Loki howled as the knife drove a centimeter deeper, flaying flesh and ripping through raw nerves. Warm blood escaped, washing over his ribs and streaming down his chest in rivers. There were no more tears to shed, nothing but blood. Blood for the demons. Blood for the blood gods.

"Why," the knife scraped across a rib, scratching bone, "Are you here?"

"Because you will it," Loki's voice cracked as he recited the well learned words.

There was nothing but torture. There was nothing but blood. And there were the few blessed minutes as he was healed. Then he would relearn the lesson all over again. And again. And again. He was their servant, fallen into their hands by their will alone, and it was to them he was to look for instruction. It was them he would serve. Eternally.

"What will you do for us," the voice questioned.

His left eye was his favorite eye. Now it was the eye he missed the most. He whimpered as the knife struck at it, carving the green from its native fields in quick, practiced, perfected strokes. There it was, on the ground before him, looking back at him, and he was ashamed. He was so slow in his answers.

"Anything," Loki whispered, staring down at his unblinking eye, "Everything."

The shadow laughed, the voice deep and grating across raw nerves and severed flesh. Loki closed his eye and breathed as deeply as he dared. The laughter meant the end. There would be rest now, and healing. And then he would have to prove himself all over again. And he was not sure if the belief that rooted so deeply in his chest now would be enough. But it would grow. It would grow, and spread, and would become all of him.

Then he would welcome the pain as a blessing, as sacrament. And he would be everything to these dark, wonderful gods that had plucked him from the darkness of their own minds to serve them. He would forget the blighted dreams of those he truly knew not, and he would surrender to the peaceful oblivion of pain.

The knife traced slowly across the fresh skin, tracing old designs with his blood.

"What is your name?"

* * *

This was a bit dark. But I never felt that Loki did what he did out of honest malice. He fell through nothingness into the hands of an alien species who were hell bent on causing death and destruction. Tea and biscuits probably weren't how they convinced Loki to gain the Tesseract for them.


End file.
